Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, 617, 430 and Quick Charge 3.0 announced

Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, 617, 430 and Quick Charge 3.0 announced

Qualcomm has been receiving a lot of flak, thanks to the issues in the Snapdragon 810 but the company plans to change it all with the Snapdragon 820. The San Diego based company made several announcements today at an event in Hong Kong. The company has announced a number of new SoCs (system-on-a-chip) including the likes of the Snapdragon 820, 617, 430 along with Quick Charge 3.0. The chipsets are already available for OEMs to test out for their upcoming devices.

The Snapdragon 820 will be the next flag bearer of Qualcomm’s efforts and the company has embedded a lot of new tech in the chipset. The 820 comes with the new X12 modem, which brings LTE speeds up to 600 Mbps downlink and 150 Mbps uplink.

Qualcomm is using a new metallic industrial design which should make sure “reduced dropped calls, [improved] cell edge throughput and even lower power consumption.” The chipset uses custom Kyro CPU structure and a new Adreno 530 GPU. We should expect Snapdragon 820 on new high-end devices early next year.

The Snapdragon 617 and Snapdragon 430 are Octa-core chipsets based on Cortex A53 architecture. The former is clocked at 1.5 GHz and packs Adreno 405 GPU while the latter is clocked at 1.2 GHz and comes with Adreno 505 GPU.

Both the chipsets have LTE support and Quick Charge 3.0 support. Snapdragon 617 devices are expected to debut by the end of 2015 while the Snapdragon 430 devices will only hit the market in Q2 2016.

Qualcomm has announced the latest iteration of Quick Charge, that is Quick Charge 3.0. The new charging standard from the company upgrades the range of charge potential support, which is now 3.6V to 20V in increments of 200mV. The Quick Charge 2.0 is supposed to be 4 times faster than the conventional chargers, 2x faster than Quick Charge 1.0 and 38 % more efficient than Quick Charge 2.0. Quick Charge 3.0 is also compatible with devices supporting Quick Charge 2.0 and there’s also support for USB Type-C connectors.

According to Qualcomm, a conventionally charged smartphone takes around 90 minutes to go from 0% to 80%, while a device supporting Quick Charge 3.0 will only take 35 minutes.

Well, we can’t wait to try out smartphones running on the new Snapdragon chipsets especially the Snapdragon 820 and see how it compares to other high-end chipsets like Exynos 7420. Quick Charge 3.0 also sounds pretty cool but we will need to test it out to see if it’s as good as it seems.